The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 9 Part 40

The main thing, from our point of view, was to get everyone in the village to believe in it before we exposed the whole thing as a hoax. It was our revenge on everyone for being so boring and sheep-like. With each pa.s.sing week, the letter pages became more polarized between huffing walkers who refused to believe the legend, and others who said they'd heard it for themselves.

Daniel and I went up the hill at the weekends and found whole groups of drunk Emos hanging around waiting to hear the cry of the murdered woman. We thought they'd start poking about, trying to find out where the sound was coming from, so Daniel periodically turned off the system from his remote, because we were worried they might start digging up the ground and tearing the bushes apart, but most of them seemed content to lie around on the gra.s.s drinking and making out. I think they really wanted to believe.

The week after this, Tara suddenly became much more friendly with me, and was cooler around Daniel, to the point where it seemed like she didn't want to see him. They'd obviously had some kind of falling out, but neither of them was prepared to talk about it. Maybe he'd tried it on with her and she wasn't having it. Daniel acted like he wasn't bothered and it didn't affect our friends.h.i.+p, and then I realized that Tara and I were kind of going out, so everything was OK.

Hang on, the sergeant is waving his stubby sausage fingers at me.

It turns out he just wanted to offer me a cup of tea. Bless.

So. Then one Friday this was about six weeks after the whole thing had started I opened the Chronicle to find a letter from a genuine schoolteacher some retired guy in Portsmouth, citing precedence for the legend.

Dear Sir, I have been following the discussions about Trethorton's Sobbing Woman with great interest. When I was a child, I well remember my late father taking me to the top of the hill to hear the cries of this poor tortured soul. He told me that she was a local Liskeard girl who had been murdered by her swain some time in the 1800s. Whenever I think of my holidays there, the memories of our trips to the "Black Hill" send s.h.i.+vers down my spine.

Yours sincerely, Arthur Parkyn Schoolteacher (retired) Black Hill? It was never called the Black Hill. What was he on about? Not to be outdone, a builder from Liskeard wrote in and put a lot more meat on the bones. I still have the cutting here.

Dear Chronicle Letters, Concerning the legend of Trethorton's Sobbing Woman, the name of the victim was Ennor Maddern. From the age of eight she worked at what was then called the Anchor Inn (demolished in 1893), where she eventually met and fell in love with a sailor named Carne Greenway. Carne was a sailor on board the HMS Sans Pareil. He served under a cruel, violent captain named either Sambourne or Sanborn, and led the mutiny against his captain in March of 1827. The captain was killed and thrown overboard to general approval of the long-suffering crew, but as Greenway was the leader of the mutineers, he was hunted by the local sheriffs as soon as he set foot on land.

The horrors of the mutiny affected this young man dreadfully. He was hounded from one county to the next and became a smuggler in order to survive. When he was finally able to make his way back to see his beloved Ennor, he discovered that she was about to marry the corrupt town magistrate. Carne came calling at her window one wild night, and she pretended to be thrilled to see him, and arranged to meet him later at Trethorton Hill. But when he arrived there Carne found that Ennor had betrayed him, and had rallied a gang of ruffians to join with her from Portlooe, where HMS Sans Pareil was docked. These men sought revenge for the death of their captain. In the ensuing fight, Carne took the girl as a hostage, and as the men came at him he took a knife to her throat as punishment for this act of betrayal.

The ghostly cry that can be heard on the Black Hill is not the sound of Ennor's death, but her sobbing in contrition for her own foolishness in ever doubting her beloved. It resonates from the standing stone which appeared after her death, placed there by villagers in commemoration, although there are those who believe her spirit resides within it. I hope this clears up the mystery surrounding this phenomenon.

Yours, James Talbot Liskeard Needless to say, Daniel and I were p.i.s.sing ourselves. The following week brought another letter, this one from a vicar who added a new detail to the story. He said "When a local magistrate identified the disguised sailor, Greenway kidnapped his daughter and brought her to the Black Hill, demanding that the magistrate deliver money and a horse, but the magistrate betrayed him, and in desperation Greenway killed the woman he loved".

It was inevitable that this point of view should be quickly revised. A woman called Dr Megan Stander, an academic from University College London, wrote in. I didn't keep a copy of her letter, but it said something like: "Typically, Mr Parkyn twists an important piece of local history to a patriarchal viewpoint in which Ennor Maddern takes the hag-role of the traditional Cornish witch or siren, luring an innocent sailor to his doom, and Carne Greenway is whitewashed to become the dominant male-hero of the story."

Another letter agreed with her, pointing out that Parkyn had reversed the legend, as the cruel sailor had in fact kidnapped Ennor and raped her on the hill, cutting her throat in a state of frenzied blood-l.u.s.t. Meanwhile, the myth was taken up by a local reporter in the Gazette who reckoned he'd uncovered the truth about the "Sobbing Virgin of Trethorton Hill". According to records she had indeed been "cruelly violat'd upon the Tor" and had cut her own throat with a straight razor out of shame. He suggested the town should erect a statue to her on top of the hill.

It was all too good to be true. Daniel and I could see that everyone was just getting in on the act, each challenging the next to come up with a new addition to the story, but I wondered: was there a possibility that they actually believed what they were saying?

The Gazette's reporter was the worst; he kept adding all kinds of details to the myth, citing unspecified "local records". But even he never explained what this girl was doing on top of a hill at midnight with a straight razor in her pocket, or why she'd become known as the Sobbing Virgin if she'd been violated. It was the most exciting thing to happen in our village in years. Even Tara became fascinated by the legend; it gave us something in common to talk about. I was dying to tell her the truth, but I decided to wait until the time was right.

The next time Daniel and I went up to Trethorton Hill, we realized that the time had come, because the entire hill was covered with people. The white stone had been roped off by the council, and there was an incredible party atmosphere; kids were selling beer from cold-bags and there was even a guy serving overpriced hot dogs. So, early the next morning, before anyone was around, we went there again and dug up the speakers. We had to go in daylight because my mobile didn't have a flash. I took shots of every step, the unearthing of the wires, the MP3 player being removed from the plastic bag, then we wrote a long letter to both the Gazette and the Chronicle about how we'd done it, and how we'd wanted to prove that people were gullible enough to believe anything. We included pictures of us removing the equipment.

The only thing I forgot to do was tell Tara about the hoax.

That was when things started to get weird. I don't think either of us had realized the effect of what we'd done. The first sign of trouble was an editorial in the Chronicle, which was now engaged in a circulation war with the Gazette, thanks to each side's determination to get to the truth of the legend. The piece was ent.i.tled; "Local Youths Deny Historic Past", and pointed the finger of blame at me and Daniel. I remember one section vividly. It said; "The story of Ennor Maddern and Carne Greenway has touched the hearts of everyone in the South West. Their tragic romance stands as a symbol of an extraordinary time in our history. It has proven to be both inspirational and instructive. For some, it is a tale of honour and oppression, a cla.s.sic example of machismo and the subjugation of women, for others it is a dire warning about the way in which cla.s.s and status corrupts innocent lives. And yet in these celebrity-obsessed times, it seems that whenever new light is thrown on our past, someone tries to push into the spotlight by refusing to believe that it ever happened." The article named us and printed our pictures, saying that we were using the legend to try and claim some fame for ourselves.

It didn't stop there. So many people swore they'd heard the sound of the sobbing woman and, of course, they had that the story was picked up on the national news, and even more visitors arrived to see what the fuss was about. The next Sat.u.r.day night, Daniel and I went back up on to Trethorton Hill and found dozens of people still up there, waiting to hear the climax of the legend being played out. And even though the speakers were no longer hidden around the stone, several of them swore they'd heard her crying. The legend was out of our hands now. It was bigger than us, and all we could do was sit back helplessly and watch it grow.

The next morning I answered the front door and was punched in the face by some mad hiker who swore at me for "trying to ruin the reputations of the Trethorton Three". I'd read somewhere that this was what they were now calling the legend, as it was suggested that there had been a love triangle between the captain of the HMS Sans Pareil, the sailor and the woman who loved them both. One school of thought was that Ennor Maddern had killed herself for the love of the captain Carne Greenway had killed. The legend was open to so many different interpretations that you could fall in with a group standing for any one of them.

Overnight we became outcasts in our own village. My parents had their car defaced. Someone spray-painted the word LIARS over our garden wall. Daniel's father stopped his allowance after some people accused him of conspiring with his son at a PTA meeting. But worst of all, Tara came around one evening to tell me that she didn't want to see me anymore.

"I identified with Ennor Maddern," she told me. "As soon as I heard her story, it was like something inside me became more complete, like I'd discovered a sister. I could feel her pain."

"I don't know how you can say that, because she doesn't exist," I told her angrily. "We made her up. There's no such person."

Tara shook her head, close to tears. "Why would you lie like this?" she asked. "I know Ennor was real. I researched her life, I even saw her picture."

"Where?"

"There are websites dedicated to her story," she told me.

"Yeah, and they've all been put together by the kind of stoners who lie on the hill at night thinking that pa.s.sing satellites are s.p.a.ce s.h.i.+ps. Believing in something doesn't make it come true. They're just trying to make their lives more interesting."

"That's not fair," she said. "You can't disrespect us by calling us stupid. I don't know why you would want to hurt us all like this." And she walked away from the front door without once looking back.

I had to prove I wasn't going mad. I searched the websites and found a number of them using a coloured lithograph of a baby-faced girl in a linen smock, labelled "Ennor Maddern, aged seventeen years, just before her tragic demise." It took me a couple of evenings to trace the picture back to an old painting of a French peasant girl which hadn't even been produced in the right country or the right century, but that didn't seem to matter to anyone. A bit of proper research should have cleared the whole matter up, but no one wanted to do it. I thought about pointing this out in another letter to the press, but decided against it. I knew that anything I said now would just make people angry.

Then Daniel got beaten up by a couple of kids in masks who stopped him on the way home from school. He came out of Liskeard Infirmary with nine st.i.tches in his face, and said he'd had enough. We decided to make one last-ditch attempt to clear our names by sending the CD with the recording of the sobbing woman to the press. We posted it to the Chronicle and the Gazette, and sat back to see the result. I think we believed that in the worst case they'd just say we were making it up again, trying to get our names in the papers. But I had this pathetic fantasy that some smart young journalist might show enough initiative to get a few witnesses together who'd agree that this was what they'd heard, and then discredit the recording by having it broken down into component parts.

I think, on the whole, I over-estimated the intelligence of the press.

What happened instead was something entirely unforeseen. The journalists were happy enough to believe that the transcription was genuine, and had us both taken into custody. According to them the sound is real, and it's a series of callous real-time recordings of a girl being raped.

Both my parents and Daniel's have admitted that to their knowledge the only girl we ever hung around with was Tara Mellor, so now it's down to her to clear our names. I'm sitting here in Liskeard police station with this s.h.i.+tty computer and my father outside smoking himself to death, waiting for Tara to come and provide a witness report.

OK. The sergeant says I have a chance to amend my statement now, in the light of what I've just heard.

All I can tell you is that I don't know why Tara would say this that Daniel raped her. She says that the week after we saw the Emos on the hill, we took her up there and Daniel pinned her down on the stone, and begged her to have s.e.x with him, and when she turned him down he held her by the throat and raped her. She says she thinks I must have been there as well to record the sound, which makes me an accessory. She says I covered up for Daniel because he was my best friend.

Part of me knows she's lying because I wasn't there, and because Daniel has a gimp leg and she's tall and strong enough to look after herself. Besides, he just wouldn't do something like that, even though he can be strange and difficult sometimes. Also her timing is out, because why would I be recording the sound if we were already playing it to visitors by that time? She says I was trying to replace the recording with a more realistic version, like that makes any sense.

But part of me also remembers how she changed toward Daniel around that time, and started to shudder whenever he came near her, like she was scared of him. And I can't get rid of the feeling that perhaps he did do something bad to her.

The worst part was in the last section of her statement. She says that ever since then, she's been going up on Trethorton Hill at night and she hears the sound of the crying woman, and the sobbing is real, and she can't tell if it's the anguished cries of Ennor Maddern, or if it's her, and it was her all along.

I don't know if Tara was raped or not. I don't know who are the deceivers any more. But there's an easy way to sort it out. Take me up to the hill at night and I'll show you where the speakers were planted, and you'll hear there's nothing there now except the wind. Going up the Black Hill is the only real way to prove my innocence. Even though part of me is terrified that I'll hear the sound of crying.

LOVE AND DEATH.

Michael Z. Lewin.

SPURRED BY BOREDOM, Salvatore Lunghi rolled the chair from behind the office desk to a place by the office window. He watched the traffic on Bath's Walcot Street below.

The cars were hardly moving. People on the pavement couldn't be seen beneath their umbrellas which were black, black and whoops, there was a blue one. It all seemed like a painting of what was inside his head. Nothing in there was moving. He had no woman he was interested in. His life had little colour.

It was all also typical of this awful cold, wet, dark summer. Where was global warming when you needed it? Salvatore sighed. How had his life brought him to this place when he was the son and brother who had carved his own path? He had resisted relentless pressures to join the family detective business, becoming a painter instead. Yet here he was, in the agency office, minding the silent phone, painting nothing. What had happened?

He rolled the chair back to the desk, not even detouring to visit the kettle. He wouldn't have minded a cup of coffee but not the instant rubbish that was available. His family was Italian, for crying out loud. Couldn't they lay on an espresso machine? But no. If he wanted real coffee he had to go down the street to Harriett's Cafe.

Or settle for tea. Gina his brother's wife preferred tea, so the makings of a decent cuppa were always available in the office. And fair enough, the office side was mostly Gina's terrain. And Gina worked hard.

Not just in the business. For a start she had her in-laws upstairs and n.o.body could call Mama or the Old Man easy. Then there was Angelo and their two kids. And with her sister-in-law living in the same house too, Gina was a saint.

Salvatore sighed again. Gina and Angelo were at the Crown Court in Bristol for the rest of the week, key witnesses in a fraud case that had occupied them for the last six months. Which is how Salvatore came to be recruited to mind the office.

Although if he really got cabin fever he could recruit his father to fill in for a bit. But calling for the Old Man was an option of last resort. It would take longer to set up than it was worth. "You think I don't know how? Huh!" his father would say about all the things he didn't know how to do these days, what with the new technologies.

And Salvatore was being paid for his time. Which meant he'd make the rent. Last month's rent, to be accurate. It's just that sometimes the cost of money felt too great.

Life was a b.i.t.c.h at the moment. Not happy and carefree like it used to be. Even the women he met in the local pubs and clubs weren't as light-hearted as they used to be. Take the blonde from last night. Lovely, sure. And funny and clever. But with two kids and two exes? Talk about baggage ... Where were the blank-canvas twenty-year-olds of yesteryear?

Hanging around with blank-canvas twenty-year-old boys. Or thirty-year-old boys. Because face it, Salvatore told himself, you're not as young as you used to be either. Or without baggage, despite having no ex-wives or children.

He wasn't going to have to grow up and settle down at last, was he?

He rolled the chair back to the window. And just as he was in position to watch the street again something unexpected happened.

The office doorbell rang.

The Lunghi Detective Agency got very few clients who hadn't made appointments first. Walk-ins happened, but they were rare. And walk-ins who looked like this one ... Well!

Hel-lo, Salvatore said to himself as he followed her up the stairs.

He held the door open for her. As she entered the office he said, "Would you like a cup of tea?"

She turned and smiled a gorgeous smile. "That would be great."

Following into the office Salvatore was struck by how gloomy it was. Books on shelves, filing cabinets ... No fish tank. No paintings. That was a terrible oversight. What better introduction to a client could he have than for her to admire a painting and for him to be able to say, "Well, actually ..."

Instead he said, "A cup of tea is the least we can offer after those stairs." The Lunghis' home and business premises were spread across the upper floors of a number of interconnected buildings. The ground-level shops provided stable rental income when agency business was slow and icing on the family cake when it wasn't. "Do sit." He gestured to the chairs facing the desk.

The woman was about thirty, tall but not skinny. She wore her rich black hair down to her shoulders. Her plain, quiet suit set off her natural colouring beautifully. Both clothes and demeanour said that she was something professional.

Then, as he watched, Salvatore suddenly saw saw a painting. A woman this woman leaning over a desk, one hand extended. Was it so she could balance herself, or was she heading for one of the desk's drawers? Was the desk hers, or someone else's? The painting would be t.i.tled Opportunity.

He almost asked if she had ever modelled. But as the woman sat Salvatore realized he was breathing heavily. Get a grip, he told himself. To the woman he said, "How do you take your tea?"

She looked up at him an oval, symmetrical face and huge blue eyes. "Milk, no sugar," she said. "Skimmed if you have it."

"Just semi, I'm afraid."

"That will do fine."

And she wasn't at all out of breath from the climb. Fit in more ways than one.

"I'm Salvatore Lunghi."

"Polly Mainwaring."

"Pleased to meet you, Polly." He turned toward the heating kettle, took a few biscuits from a tin and arranged them on a plate. He put the plate on the desk before her. "Full service detectives," he said as he went back to the teapot. The kettle boiled. He poured the water and carried pot, milk and mugs to the desk on a tray. He sat behind the desk while the tea steeped. "Give it a moment. Then I'll be mother."

She smiled.

Then, leaning forward just a little and speaking quietly, Salvatore said, "People who come to a detective agency are often uncertain whether it's the right thing to do. I want to stress that anything you say here is in complete confidence."

"OK, thank you."

"And if you would prefer to talk to a woman, my sister is working nearby and I can ask her to come in. Either way, our first job is to decide if what we do here can help you. No charge for that, of course." He gave it a moment and then unleashed one of his famous and devastating smiles.

But Polly Mainwaring didn't seem to need gentle unpicking of a knot of uncertainty. Nor did she seem to react to the smile. She just said, "It's my fiance."

A fiance. Salvatore caught sight of the ring. With its big rock.

Ah well.

"What about your fiance?"

"Something weird happened and I can't get a straight answer from him. I think he's lying to me, and that's no way to begin a new life together." And suddenly the controlled, businesslike face of Polly Mainwaring puckered into wrinkles of distress.

Salvatore wanted to take her in his arms. He wanted to say, I'll help you ditch this lying sc.u.mbag. He wanted to ask her to model for him. However, what he did say was "Tell me about it."

"Jack and I met at the hospital. I was visiting my Aunt Elaine. She had kidney cancer, though she's OK now."

Salvatore hadn't expected the history of the relations.h.i.+p but Polly seemed to want to tell it. He nodded sympathetically. And he did enjoy looking into her eyes.

"Jack's a nurse, and a really good one. Everyone on Auntie's ward loved him. She'd told me about him even before I met him. But when I did, when we did, it was, like, boom. You know? Love. The real thing. Wonderful."

"How long ago was that?"

"Months now. Seven."

"And you decided to get married?"

"Six weeks ago. But neither of us wanted a bells and whistles wedding."

"No?"

"The money's better used to start us off in our new life together. Jack has plenty, but I don't have much left over each month and my family's just, you know, comfortable."

"Uh huh."

"So six days ago we went to the Register Office to make arrangements." Polly's face began to contort again. "And the registrar ... She greeted Jack by name. By name. 'h.e.l.lo, Jack,' she said when we walked in."

Salvatore waited but there was no more. "I don't understand."